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Sep 1 2023

# London Grip New Poetry – Autumn 2023

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The Autumn 2023 issue of London Grip New Poetry features:

*Bill Richardson *Denise O’Hagan *Charles G Lauder *Julia Deakin
*Tina Norris *Deborah Harvey *Pam Job *Laura Grevel
*Ping Yi *Jacob Mckibbin * James Norcliffe *Caleb Murdock
*Fred Johnston *Norbert Hirschhorn *Hannah Linden *Tim Relf
*Sue Dymoke *John Freeman *Rosemary Norman *Stuart Handysides
*Janice D Soderling *Lydia Harris *David Goldstein * Megan Cartwright
*Peter Daniels *Robert Cole *Tony Dawson *Jennifer Johnson
*Wendy French *Stuart Pickford *Jim C Wilson *Elizabeth Gibson
*Estelle Price *Rupert M Loydell *Tony Beyer *Katherine Gallagher *Mary Franklin

Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors.
Biographical notes on contributors can be found here

London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December

A printer-friendly version of this issue can be found at
LG New Poetry Autumn 2023

SUBMISSIONS: please send up to THREE poems plus a brief bio to poetry@londongrip.co.uk
Poems should be in a SINGLE Word attachment
or else included in the message body
Submission windows are: December-January, March-April,
June-July & September-October

Editor’s notes

Our cover image of a chess board is specifically suggested by poems in this issue from Robert Cole and Tony Dawson. But chess embodies ideas of movement, progress, quest etc and thus relates also to other contributions which deal with goals and journeys (Julia Deakin, Laura Grevel) and with what we choose to carry or are forced to leave behind. Chess can also be a metaphor for the game of life (as in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal) and our readers will find poems about the gambits we employ and positions we occupy while negotiating family and work relationships (John Freeman, Rosemary Norman) as we advance towards the endgame (that never results in a draw!) The last few poems are concerned with the risky strategy our species is currently employing against climate change (Katherine Gallagher, Mary Franklin). Here surely we are in great danger of losing more than just a sacrificial pawn or two.

For the second time in a few months we have the sad task of reporting the death of one of our contributors. Sue Dymoke, whose poem ‘Secret Girl’ appears half-way through this issue, was a widely published poet as well as being Associate Professor of Education at Nottingham Trent University until her death on June 13th, 2023. There will be a memorial celebration in Nottingham in November and her Shoestring Press collection, What to do Next, will be published at about the same time.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
London Grip poetry editor
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    Bill Richardson: Legacy Issues

    On this strip of Spanish coast,
    replete with Mercs and Porsches
    – and a not inconsiderable number of brand-new Rolls Royces –
    cars are what you wear,
    and like the Polo shirts and Armani dresses,
    serve to enhance your plumage,
    signal your Marbella standing,
    announce your status in the pecking order,
    tell how, when you die,
    you’ll leave a legacy listed in the papers.
    	*	*	*
    A lone starling landed in my garden,
    flicked around the strip of rain-soaked lawn,
    gorging undisturbed.
    With worms and insects tasty on the palate,
    he relaxed into his feed –
    never saw the prowling cat.
    But the cat saw him, and pounced.
    The cat’s gone now, and the starling’s legacy
    is a bunch of bones picked clean,
    and some dark and glossy feathers.

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    Denise O’Hagan: Holding the upper hand

            come here,
    my emerald-eyed beauty,
    if the mood should take you
           —for you’ve let me know
    this is not an equal relationship, and you hold
    the upper hand—
            allow me to run my fingers
    along the stepping stones of your backbone,
    as you settle in my arm, curved
            for your pleasure,
    your little mound of chin resting
    lightly on my shoulder, your breath
            brushing my cheek,
    soft as the wings of the moth you found
    the other day paying hopeless fluttering homage
            to the living-room lamp, unaware
    of being in your sights or your tail swishing slowly
    as you perfectly, tremblingly, timed
            its tiny crushing velvet
            death

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    Charles G Lauder: Ella’s Journey

    her old life is a corpse growing cold in the bed
    smothered by her lover’s bulk     she takes much
    of his heat as the quilt lends no warmth

    the afterlife’s realms are thorny and blustery
    but she is never pricked nor scratched     buoyed up
    by the bubble of new life expanding within her

    her lover dissolves away     his house possessed
    by the shades of a wife and daughters
    he never mentioned

    she crashes to the ground     gravity holding so tight
    she struggles to walk     crawls away but tempted
    to let the hot dank earth welcome her

    Father doesn’t see her     doesn’t speak to her
    her brothers flee in fear     Mother hexes
    the threshold so she can’t cross over

    no guide through this dark wood of days
    till she finds the home for lost girls     the midwife
    holds her hand through the long night

    her chest cradles the weight of her son
    when he arrives     she will be his refuge
    he will be whoever he wants to be

    the path ahead proves rough and stern and wind-blown
    she spies her vanished lover picking his way
    through fires he’s lit     his house in ashes

    her family urge giving the boy away
    his swarthy skin a hard slap on their pale flesh
    she’s still not allowed inside

    just before she hands him over to the living
    she crafts him an amulet: new name new father
    he can be whoever she wants him to be

    the dark-haired German doctor she cooked for
    before her life ended     an affair of the heart
    that’ll be much easier to swallow

    when he’s in their arms  the boy’s new family
    disappear as well     giving false names in case
    she should ever want him back

    she banishes herself to roads heading east
    feeling every stone and root stretched across her path
    leaves crunch beneath her feet     for the time being all is solid

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    Julia Deakin: By heart

    She moved to the middle of nowhere, Lincolnshire,
    leaving, said the Kent side, no address and taking little –
    going where no one would know her, nobody
    could drop in.

    So when we did, she looked as confused as us, considering
    however many years her honeymoon face
    had been replaced, all but the eyes,
    by this dull, crumpled one.

    And there was him. Laurence. Where he came in
    no one was sure but without us perhaps he was company
    of sorts. His talk strafed ours with army anecdotes
    as we glanced round

    that close, pictureless room, wondering
    what they shared. The old songs? Churchill’s words?
    A war and its scars? Such frail vessels casting off
    for a beginning, and an end.

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    Tina Norris: Café Fulcrum

    His boxer’s nose is healthy pink these days,
    bicep bulking
    under the fine cotton of his tee shirt
    as he lifts his cappuccino.

    The smooth-faced woman opposite him,
    sits thin,
    her thoughts winding away
    like cigarette smoke.

    They look out to the windy bay
    where a girl on a buffeted deck
    struggles with a mainsail,
    strands of hair whipped tight around her neck.

    He will take a drink this evening,
    they both think.

    ’Have you got money?’ the woman tries.
    And there
    at the top corner of his right eye,
    on the ridge of the orbital socket:
    the tic.
    A lash between calm and fury
    before the chair tips forward
    or back.

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    Deborah Harvey: Premonition

    It was early September
    and we were living in a city on the far side of the country.

    I knew no one and when people heard me speak they’d say
    don’t tell me, you’re from Norfolk. (I’d never been to Norfolk.)

    One day I was pushing you in your pushchair
    through the park and there was this bite in the air, the first

    shiver of winter and it took me back to the year before
    when we lived closer to home

    and I was carrying you under my ribs
    never having seen your face or rested my cheek on the curve

    of your head, just waiting for you, the dream of you
    the love of you.

    The loneliness I felt that day is the same I carry
    everywhere with me

    now you’re ten years older than I was then
    and living in a city at the far end of the country.

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    Pam Job: In the deep dark wood

    I’m in Sweden – the forest creeps outside every window and already I feel claustrophobic.

    Only yesterday, they told us, there had been a pair of elks in the far garden.

    Apparently, elks are trouble.

    In the evening we finished off the reindeer stew with forest mushrooms, followed by snowberries,
         or were they salmonberries,
              like in the film by Percy Adlon where K D Lang takes off her clothes in the library.

    It was a long time ago and I am trying to order my memories. Everything these days is a long time ago
         and I am finding memory mutable.

    There was a heavy dark green feeling in the house made of wood, as if the trees were still alive,
         watching us from knotholes in the timbers.

    I could go mad in this place. This I knew soon after we arrived to stay with my lover’s ex-lover.

    Later I knew something else – cancer lurked in crevices, waiting for a way in through someone’s skin.

    No matter how scrubbed Swedish clean everything seemed, there was an edgy air to conversations
         I didn’t understand, so I watched the trees advance,moon shadows also moving closer.

    On the window glass, pale reflections of ourselves shone among the conifers. We all had haloes then.

    The next day I emerged from the depths of myself
         and we took baskets into the forest where daylight ended.

    To step outside was to feel the drift of a thousand years of pine needles beneath my feet
         and to smell the scent of something gone.

    We picked more mushrooms and more berries.

    None of this ended well but the details are lost to me now.

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***

    Laura Grevel: Nomad

    When I left,
    I took my mother’s last breath—heard over the phone.  A silk tiger dress on sale at the dry cleaners.
    An orange rock from a desert.  The loss of friends;  the questions. The smell of rain.  The taste of
    the last night.  The grief.  The bats.

     I remembered myself at the last minute.

    When I left,
    I took the hedgerows and the hedged smiles of the children who’d carried miles.  I took the town’s
    black nights, and the children who’d tried to find the light.  I took the city’s slights, the hard-bought
    strikes, the pitied rights. I took a turn for the worse, then a step back to learn. I had not much to give,
    but I filled a sieve, poured my heart into the people’s grief.

    Take this quick, before the thief.

    When I left,
    I took my children’s teeth and four dictionaries, because languages are useful.  I took the memory
    of many photos, the moody sky, the names of my kin.  There was no room for disappointments but
    I worked in two doughnuts.  My passport was mouldy; I traded it for yours.  I freed my laptop at
    the park, sold my phone at the corner.  I added a pencil, a small notebook and the word love.

    All else seemed superficial.

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    Ping Yi: Memorabilia

    I remember shophouse alleys that ran forever and smelled, housing unknown families
         and unknowable lives.
    I don’t remember the beginning.

    I remember teacher pointing at the rabbit poster, saying it has two ears,
         the leap ear being longer than the non-leap ear.
    I don’t remember the first book I read, only the later E. Blytons, a local dollar and thirty apiece,
         brand-new at the Indian seller’s bookwall.

    I remember the sight of a million people and the heat of a million spotlights,
         the terror of a million stares and glares, my humiliation fossilised on Kodachrome.
    I don’t remember how I finally fell asleep, after panicking whenever I could not.

    I remember toothbrushes and filled mugs lined up along the open drain,
         synchronized mass oral hygiene at the end of school recess.
    I don’t remember the timetable of each year, painstakingly hand-drawn and colour-coded.

    I remember the encyclopedia salesman with his thirty-five volumes of New Knowledge Library;
         he did not cry like the Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman did.
    I don’t remember agreeing to be thrown into the local pool every Saturday at three,
         nor to the chlorinated nasal sear.

    I remember Catholic building character during Physical Education,
         mind-numbing jogs through the multi-denominational cemetery-cum-crematorium at dusk.
    I don’t remember how many times I fell, or whether I ever stopped falling.

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    Jacob Mckibbin: The Summer The Grass On All The Playing Fields Turned Gold

    was the summer that my brother got stabbed
    was the summer knife crime was in the news more frequently than the weather forecast
    was the summer that every weather forecast mentioned how many days england
                                                                                                                           had been without rain
    was the summer his blood stayed on the pavement for so long it started to rust
    was the summer that everyone was buried beneath grass that had turned gold
                                                                                                                                         in the drought
    was the summer that the grass showed it will only turn gold when it is dying
    was the summer that the grass showed that there is almost no way to kill it

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***

    James Norcliffe: Dewy-eyed pessimists

    And all at once our world is filled with ducklings.
    They cross the lawn, scramble through the doors,
    and scatter like animated fluff balls across the carpet
    in such cheeping numbers we find the problem
    of where to place our feet all but impossible
    to solve. Luckily, levitation comes to our aid
    allowing us to float safely above the seething mass
    of soft brown down and tiny yellow beaks.

    But safely only for the moment for our floating brings
    no peace of mind. In short time we are beset by worry,
    the worry that is a companion to all temporary
    solutions. Outside the shrubbery is filled
    with claws, the sky with talons. How can we
    demand the ducklings leave? How can we allow
    them to stay? We are trapped by cuteness.
    We have permitted the ducklings to become our guests;
    They have permitted us to become their prisoners.

    James Norcliffe: The euphemism farm

    The euphemism farm
    is somewhere beyond Hamilton
    or perhaps in the foothills of Timaru.

    Its slopes are gentle and always green,
    the soft green of happiness,
    and the grass is plentiful and delicious.

    It is where Jaffa, the injured pony,
    was taken in a well-sprung horse caravan
    on roads without bends or potholes.

    Sally, the psychotic poodle, was given
    a special place there as well, a place
    populated with friendly rabbits,

    rabbits who loved being chased
    and who succumbed with good humour
    and grace when seized by the neck.

    The euphemism farm is managed by
    compassionate farmers who double
    as vets, but who eschew white lab coats

    in favour of pastels. They all have silver
    sideburns and smiling eyes which crinkle,
    and each answers to the name of Adam.

    James Norcliffe: The heart is a helium balloon

    This sparkling collection confirms the author’s
    growing reputation as one of the most
    promising of our younger writers.

    It is true that he tends to look away
    when confronted by darker places.

    This is understandable: nobody wants to wallow
    in unpleasantness, and it is ultimately
    to his credit that soft focus has blunted
    the sharpness, pastel has softened primary colours,
    and that the sound of children’s screaming
    or whimpering in the corner
    has been completely  erased.

    It seems the writer’s heart
    is a helium balloon,
    the sun catching its silver glitter.

    Some would say, and I agree,
    that we need more of this:
    a sky shimmering with floating hearts,
    sparkling, silent, and free.

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    Caleb Murdock: Twelve Feet from Sanity

    “The meek shall inherit the Earth.”

    Was it the Big J who said that, or is
    it buried somewhere in his Father’s book?

    I prefer to call them “timid”, and they
    seem to populate my world.

    Today they are standing twelve feet apart
    in the checkout queue.  (This isn’t about
    the pandemic.)  Customer B tells me
    she doesn’t want to “crowd” Customer A,
    who is negotiating with the clerk.
    Customer C stands twelve feet behind B,
    and I am expected to take my place
    twelve feet behind him.  They may be timid,
    but they know their communal ways.

    But what if Entitled E walks up and tries
    to break into line?  Will Timid B or C
    speak up?  Not likely.  It will come down to me,
    Abrasive D, to fix the problem; and though
    I have the courage, my fighting years are done,
    and all I have are words to win the day.

    The Meek may inherit the Earth, but
    only when the Mean are done with it.

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    Fred Johnston: Song On Leaving A Madhouse
    ‘A strange set-up.’  Alphonse Daudet: La Doulou

    There was basket making in a separate garden place
    And through the windows and down the lawns was the sea
    Most of us had a few days’ stubble on our face
    And through the windows and down the lawns was the sea

    The corridor was a long and thin and a narrow space
    And we moved in line along it like Great War gassed
    We saw and heard things inside-out and out of place
    And we moved in line in half-light like Great War gassed

    One of us was so far gone he could not read
    Who’d once read for a living and we knew his face
    By times the very ill are stupid and we shunned his need
    Who’d once read for a living and we all knew his face

    On a weak, flowerless Monday they let me go
    A hundred yards to the main gate and the world
    In my eyes the light of the loony-bin’s mad afterglow
    Down a hundred yards to the main gate and the world.

    Fred Johnston: Quietus

    Good men like ourselves enter the age of funerals
    And follow up the same hill the black sun-sleek funerary cars
    Up, with all the rest of the city’s traffic slowed, to the gates
    Open on the Underworld, solemn some of us, laughter
    In the endentured mouths of others; it’s all a bit much, really.

    We go anyway, stooping into the incline under desultory trees
    Wary of the spits of rain and wary of the grey sheets of sky;
    And the women who, it seems, were flighty girls yesterday
    Or at most the day before, are smaller and less attractive
    Than we remember: God knows what they see to look at us.

    Little potted histories coagulate as the smug hearse turns in
    Grandly chewing the gravel and spitting it out under big wheels
    We’re granted a view en movement of the brown wood casket, relatives
    Anonymous to most of us as witnesses testifying from behind a screen:
    We make small remarks: He had a good run. Isn’t it ourselves we mean?

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***

    Norbert Hirschhorn: Ode To My Body

    Oh body, my body, my buddy since birth, with me through
    thick & thin, fair  & foul, I gave you pleasure, you gave me
    the same —  remember the time when we nearly  — well,
    wasn’t  that something  &  here  we’ve  been  together for
    decades, now approaching the shades  —  please,  buddy,
    don’t quit on me now.

    Norbert Hirschhorn: Haibun For My American Despair

    When life & television were benign, all problems solved in 54
    minutes (Mayberry RFD & The Waltons,  none with ‘Negroes’
    of course), I’d get  tucked into bed, knowing  I was safe in the
    hands of whatever  loving god still existed,  in the land of the
    free, the home of pure water, good air. I’m eighty-five now, a
    survivor, actuarially five more to go, half of those in one state
    of decay or another.

    		late April storm
    		cherry blossoms torn
    		scattered

    		empty 	wheelchair

    As I approach the penultimate page of my own book of life, I
    see  earth  heating  up  unnaturally;  prime  forests  burning;
    animals erased;  pandemics finding our too  large population
    good to eat; children dying at sea & in the streets; fascists re-
    elected. I’m like the boy who stubs his toe in the dark: too old
    to cry, too hurt to laugh.

    		spring melt   waterfall
    		dead oak teeters
    		on the edge

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    Hannah Linden: The Gift

    This year I accept he needs grounding
    give him a bass guitar to balance
    his violin. He shows me the bassists
    he had researched over the last year
    and he’s already catching their tail
    feathers, learns a couple of riffs before
    playing Drowsy Maggie at speed on his fiddle
    follows it with a piece by Vivaldi that he knows
    now by heart. He’s giving my youth back to me,
    all the parts I loved so much but left behind
    when I stopped being in a band. And it’s like
    something of me is still singing in the gaps
    between his now and his future, like we
    never really lose anything if we keep
    open to it in someone else. I tell him
    the names of some of the bassists
    I loved and he asks me to tell him which
    fiddle players I’d mentioned before
    he was ready. And we both move
    forward another year.

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    Tim Relf: Scrabble

    well done aunty sue would say
    to the speechless teenager staying
    to double letters and triple words shapes scattering
    outstretched arms running legs never quite
    my father’s face
    Eleven twelve once even one o’clock we sat
    in a house that wasn’t mine mouthing sounds
    at a silence that swarmed the space
    and stalked me
    up the stairs
    No mention of the blank beyond or bed before the reckoning
    (somehow the scores never ended so very far apart)
    unpunctuated days passing nights awake
    grandfather clocks striking airless
    DEAD

    Once, playing the game decades later, I added up
    what it was worth: that consonant-encased and vowel-riddled thing.
    Six points. Six, that’s all.
    But setting those squares in place gave expression
    of sorts, I see now, to the unspeakable –

    like learning the alphabet all over again;
    every tile, every morpheme – multiplying
    towards a many-years-off meaning:
    spelled out,
    still unspoken.

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***

    Sue Dymoke: Secret Girl

    Janice slips down the climbing frame
    spins inside her yellow hoop
    cradles family secrets
    among screaming playground grey.

    Janice breaks up birch twigs
    peels and counts the waxy pieces.
    If their number is even
    the devil will get us soon.

    Janice says laburnum weeps
    deadly evil poisonous tears.
    She sidles through switch grass
    by our big red classroom wall.

    Janice finds my dinner coins
    stashed beneath shining conkers.
    She won’t say who took them
    but they know that she knows.

    Janice is a Russian doll
    a house with hiding places
    a face behind the mirror
    a diamond among glass.

    Janice with the ice blond stare
    rides her grandad’s fairground pony
    blue cape flaring out behind her
    North wind streaming through her hair.

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***

    John Freeman:  Boiling Over

    A boy who might have been about sixteen
    was walking towards me with a woman
    or girl who from a distance could have been
    a lover or, as they came closer, maybe
    an older friend or sister. Closer still,
    she might have been just old enough to be
    his mother, and when they passed me I watched
    as he said something equably to her
    which because of the traffic and the distance
    I couldn’t hear, but I heard her answer,
    all right, fine, a phrase which can mean what it says,
    as at first I thought it had done in this case,
    or like yeah, right, the double positive
    which makes a negative. As I walked on
    I heard behind me louder than the traffic
    what sounded like someone stamping their feet,
    not so much an expression as an outlet,
    an uncontainable brimming over
    of what I think it would be wrong to call
    anger, though it presents itself as that,
    but is more like desperation, and I turned –
    I couldn't help it – and saw the woman
    standing facing the roaring cars and buses,
    with her hands clamped to her head above her ears
    as if she was in danger of exploding
    and her skull needed help to stop her brain
    flying out in bits all over Millbank,
    spattering windscreens like a slimy nail-bomb,
    and I wondered what the boy could have said
    to make her boil up like milk in a pan
    till it spilled out and hissed as it fell down
    staining the hob, which would need cleaning after.
    I looked away, not to be caught staring,
    thinking that in the extremity she was
    undergoing, that woman was all of us.

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    Rosemary Norman: Each Other

    This has to stop.

    They have walked
    away from each other &

    walked back. They have flown
    side by side to secluded beaches

    & there, swam –
    all that water, weight & salt

    his & hers. They have come home
    to dinner among one another’s belongings.

    They have argued. They have watched films
    with honest endings, not necessarily sad.

    They are loved
    by each other’s loved-ones

    & with no more ambivalence
    than is right & proper. Therefore

    they are resolved
    once & for all to make an end

    of saying “Do I?”.

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    Stuart Handysides: Illumination

    ‘This is nice,’ you said
    as if to say it sealed a deal
    confirmed that this was special
    and left unspoken might be lost.

    Or did you need to check
    that I enjoyed it too?

    But what it made me feel
    was that you’d stepped outside
    the moment, neutralised
    the magic of the place
    and time, that what you sought
    was not to be immersed
    transcended, but defined

    — and suddenly, it seemed
    that we were poles apart.

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    Janice D Soderling: The Piano

    It stood against the wall, silent, stiff, upright
    in that dead room we called the living room.
    A space she entered weekly
    to wipe away the rural dust
    from a framed kitschy Christ,
    the porcelain bric-a-brac,
    the glass-topped coffee table,
    the prim piano.

    Her husband brought it home as a peace offering
    during an early truce in their own Thirty Years' War.

    Was it disappointed to never have its locked lid lifted like a skirt?
    to not cut loose on an ecstatic adagio, a ragtime or boogie woogie,
    to never know the exquisite melancholy of a Chopin prelude?

    Did she unlock the lid
    when her children were at school,
    her husband at work?
    How lonely those two must have been,
    in that off-limits room,
    that tense, pretty housewife and her close-mouthed piano.
    scowling, inscrutable, enigmatic,
    unforgiving.

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    Lydia Harris: the second wife

    climbs through the window from the garden
    opens the first wife’s curtains

    climbs into the first wife’s bed
    lies between the crumpled sheets

    smoothes the first wife’s letters
    copies the first wife’s names and addresses

    polishes the first wife’s Swedish cutlery
    the spoon which slid  under the bed

    when the first wife was smiling then dying
    the second wife stands by the door

    where they manoeuvred the  first wife’s body
    into the cold, to the silence her words had left

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    David Goldstein: What we remember

    Dinner with my ex-wife.
    Her partner of the past five years
    has just died, and she is reading
    her old journals, and finding
    a more complex picture of their relationship
    than she remembered. The journals
    do not lie, nor do they have regard
    to the pious injunction to not speak ill of the dead.

    After our divorce she warned me,
    if I ever read her journals, to remember
    our marriage was not as bad as I would find
    written there. The journals may not lie
    but the truth they hold is partial, is coloured
    by the moods, the burdens, the sufferings
    that we ourselves bring to the events we write of
    that we ourselves had a part in the making of.

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***

    Megan Cartwright: The Year of Bone China
    after Plath

    Doubt constricts my
    windpipe, wringing
    shame from golden

    vowels that ring
    my fingers, the old
    metal wearing thin.

    Twenty years told
    in the set of my jaw,
    to have and to hold,

    holds true no more.
    You like me meek,
    seeking to shore

    up your ego. Cheeks
    fractured filigree;
    the havoc you wreak.

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    Peter Daniels: Royal Worcester

    I rattle the crockery a little, its chime resounds
    in time and space and is real. My heart keeps up
    the tension to express whatever exists, and look!
    Here we are, doing what we do, drinking in
    reality out of the special fancy porcelain cups
    that are otherwise only left piled up in a sideboard
    for the unseen world to keep them, where they’re
    hard to grasp, missing their actual presence with
    the fingers holding the handle, and the lips that sip
    on the rim. Life would be a blank without me
    to connect thing to thing, and own them as pieces
    of myself, as facts. I drink from the very goblet
    of the potion that lets me tell you: Yes, this
    is the world we swallow, we take it in, it’s ours.

    Peter Daniels: Empty Boxes

    A seashell has been emptied of its owner, but
    a box begins as itself, with a need to enclose.
    Was Pandora’s box purpose-made, or were
    those things shoved into something handy?
    The empty box is still somewhere, missing
    its ungrateful contents, holding only air.

    I have many lovely boxes, too lovely to fill,
    like these nifty cigar boxes, some plain wood,
    some fancy ones. The man who gave me them
    forty years ago, he’s been dead for thirty-five:
    they screwed his box down tight, afraid
    of what they had to put away inside it.

    Finding new purposes for boxes takes luck
    and judgement, for the size and shape they fit.
    Give me shoeboxes and toffee tins, containers
    too good to chuck. The shoes and chocolates
    are elsewhere now, but Pandora’s things
    will still be jostling us, they mock our boxes.

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    Robert Cole: When the nematodes evolved

    A grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard,
    Essentially the mantissa obtained using Napier’s bones
    Zeros & ones, Boolean algorithms computed
    By Augusta Byron & Charles Babbage’s mainframe.

    I remember reading alphabetically in the old school
    On the edge of the tessellated floor, pixelated
    Recalling Kepler’s exoplanets & Copernicus;
    Forging ahead with the matrices’ correlative memories

    The heart of the machine, a cogent mindfulness:
    AI a fragmentation of the human genome –
    The pointillistic dot matrix selects its dialectic code
    Its very best gambits to win the anonymous game

    We’re all one in the mirror image: knowledge –
    A material dialectic for rebooting the system;
    Remembering when the indices were differentiated;
    When the nematodes evolved Chomsky’s logic.

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    Tony Dawson: Fool's Mate

    He sat down on the bench beside me,
    a dishevelled figure in a shabby suit.
    I felt uncomfortable. Since Covid, nobody sits
    close to strangers anymore. He turned to me.
    “I’m Mort,” he grunted. I pretended not to hear.
    He pulled out one of those pocket chess sets
    that no one has used since the iPad was invented.
    “Would you like to play?” “I’m not very good
    at chess,” I replied. “No matter,” said Mort,
    “I don’t often lose anyway,” and he set out the pieces
    so that I was the one who had to begin the game.
    Just two moves later, my life was slipping away.

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    Jennifer Johnson: Rectangle

    What is this black rectangle
    surrounded by snow?
    It depends on who sees it,
    their neurone connectivity.

    If you believe in aliens
    you might think a tiny spacecraft
    has silently taken off from here
    leaving no message,

    for art lovers it could be
    a pictorial representation
    of those sharp corners
    that continually tear our lives,

    and lovers of horror
    might believe, what with Covid,
    that a couple recently buried
    are lying underneath, still fevered.

    Maybe it is, after all, just a space
    left by a car but pedestrians slow,
    talking in different languages,
    drawn to that rectangular darkness.

    Jennifer Johnson: Concerning the Deceased

    See my toy cows.  They need some sun.
    I take them out.  The grass is huge.
    They fall.  Their legs stick up in the air
    like dead sheep mum tries to hide from me.

    I’ve never seen my uncle
    but we’ve made his room nice.
    The phone rings.  He won’t be coming.
    My mum says I have to stay next door
    while she and dad go to the funeral.

    University over, I wait with you
    in Gatwick Departure Lounge
    waiting for the fog to clear.

    Later, we bounce on Saharan turbulence
    watching in-flight movies full of death.
    I did not know that you would never return,
    that wild animals would kill you.
    Your girlfriend had to wait all night for help.
    The Field Officer told me to write condolences
    but I’d never met your mum.

    A few years on, a phone call told me
    my best friend had died,
    the address of the crematorium.
    His family sent me my letters from Africa –
    my maddest confusion.

    Since then, so many have died
    When I walk past that long wall of hearts
    I realise how each expresses
    a separate, unbearable absence.
    Then there are the wars including
    one in my birthplace
    and now there’s the dread
    of the future passing of friends.
    As for my own death, I fear only pain.

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    Wendy French: In Passing
    for Edwin

    I wasn’t expecting anyone
    but was still surprised to see you
    I was passing. Thought I’d pop in.

    We went through to the kitchen
    and made tea. How are things? I asked
    Some days are better than others, like life.

    I’d be sent gingerbread from Grasmere
    and you spread it thickly with marmalade.
    I hadn’t realised that you liked marmalade so much.

    I haven’t tasted anything so good for a long time
    I made a mental note to buy more.
    This feels like my whole life in one hour

    Which one of us said that?
    I have to be on my way. And you passed through the
    door as you left eight years ago without a goodbye.

    Wendy French: Diane brings in an Old Wasps’ Nest

    her pride in this old house bogged down by marshland in torrential rain.
    Diane carries in a paper, an almost fossilised papyrus nest she’d rescued
    from her summer house.

    Family and friends were spreading cream onto freshly baked scones.
    The fire laden with cedar blazed, Raph piled more wood onto the old grate.
    Young children cracked nuts and decorated macaroons with gaudy icing.

    Looking round I placed our dead into this scene. And with a trick of light
    through stained glass our father sat sipping his drink, gazing at his family
    while our mother murmured, Who’d have thought it would  come to this?

    We never knew what she meant.
    Now as Diane walked round showing her precious goods
    I wanted to shout, You’re dead, Dad, dead. Don’t do this to me.

    But he’s there and his glass of Bell’s never empties.
    It’s hard to stay in this room full of laughter with the falling light
    for on the day you died you told your carer, I’m going to die today

    and she replied, Be positive. We’re positive here.
    But you, as positive in death as in life, dropped down dead.
    Charlie ran up the corridor like a headless chicken,

    flapping her arms and squawking. Crying.
    How the light fades for all of us here and the red from the window
    lands on the old wasp’s nest resting on the table next to the scones.

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    Stuart Pickford: Egg

    The chicken splutters over
    the fence, struts about
    the flames of nasturtiums
    at the bottom of the cenotaph.

    Around Corporal Metcalf’s inscription,
    limestone dressed with fossils
    from a tropical sea. No mention
    of the sniper in late 1918.

    As clouds pull rain across the fields,
    the chicken nips at a plastic photo
    of an ANZAC from Queensland,
    outback throbbing in the heat.

    The station master comes home for lunch,
    sees but doesn’t see the names
    of all those still dead,
    fusses the chicken back into his garden.

    He picks up a warm egg
    from beneath a Portland headstone,
    cups it in his hand
    inside his jacket pocket.

    Indoors, he glances at the clock
    and leads his wife upstairs,
    drawing the curtains in the bedroom
    that looks out over the graves.

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    Jim C Wilson:Three Rondelets

    After The Party

    And so to bed.
    The wine’s all drunk; the talk has died;
    and so to bed.
    My eyes are red, my legs like lead.
    I know I tried, I really tried,
    yet ended up dissatisfied.
    And so to bed.

    Railway Rondelet

    I’m on the train.
    I’m talking loud so you can hear
    I’m on the train.
    Are you still there? What’s that again?
    The signal isn’t very clear –
    I’m going into a tunnel, Dear...
    I’M ON THE TRAIN!

    Montfort

    The sun is low.
    The château glows in dying light.
    The sun is low.
    The woods grow dark and loud. A crow
    is calling, somewhere, out of sight.
    I feel the touch of coming night.
    The sun is low.

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    Elizabeth Gibson: Fainting

    If I ever faint in front of you,
    you will realise, hopefully, how
    peaceful it is for me. The moments
    before are the worst, dizzy and sick,
    but then it is just like sleeping.
    The exact moment is a mystery,
    when I cross over to my mind
    and its dreams, and this world can be

    so important, so real, my work
    there so immediate, that I may
    well resist getting up from the floor
    when you ask me to – or did you
    catch me, and am I in your lap?
    Either way, I am far, in another
    universe, and if I talk nonsense
    to you as lucidly as day, I will probably

    forget it all in minutes,
    seconds, when I wake fully.
    Don’t mind me. Maybe it will
    bring us closer, maybe not,
    but I just don’t want you to be afraid.
    Give me sugar – a wafer biscuit,
    like my mother did, last time.
    Hold my fingers. I will be fine.

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    Estelle Price: Being the only woman over forty in the yoga class

    Candles are lit, scent of jasmine, hyacinth, blue mist.
    The air is sharp, its whiskers icy on my cheeks. From the shadows
    pristine voices talk of teenagers, work, a craving

    for time to breed.  In the belly of the church I sit cross-legged.
    A piano ripples music into spaces where tomorrow’s
    prayers will be born. I creak like an old pew

    into downward facing dog. My muscles sob. I am ignored
    by the rood screen and the carved crucifix. Come back
    to standing, the teacher says, be as birch trees

    in a newly planted forest. And the young women,
    who can’t see the calloused future in their midst, perch on one leg.
    Not trees but a flock of flamingos, less blurred versions

    of me from a distant life in South Gosforth when my children
    still milked at home and I daily swung in motherhood’s playground,
    the present dizzy in my lap. This flickering night

    only I teeter. In these dwindled days my mind balances
    like a middle-aged ant two thirds of her way
    across a trapeze. Why do tremors still clutch at my leg?

    After, the flock flutters over herbal tea.
    I, shy, even at sixty, scurry away with angry thighs, my identity
    shoved, like a leaflet no one will take, into a rucksack.

    Another day prepares to bolt its doors. Somewhere a woman
    like me brings her hands together. By the time I die I ask
    the avenue of ancient oaks, will I already be a ghost?

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    Rupert M Loydell: A Theology of Ghosts

    If you take a paint tin
    you can flatten it and
    then recycle. Just how
    many tenses are there
    or ways to skin a cat?

    How quickly imagination
    becomes autobiography,
    the supernatural soon
    accepted and turned
    into daytime TV.

    Who keeps a check on
    the deep end and why?
    I am not of this world,
    go in and out of fashion
    from one year to the next

    as waving girls pass by,
    become older and older,
    then finally departed.
    In the beginning was
    the end I'd forgotten

    for a time, but not any
    more. Do you understand
    the words? Do you know
    that I have my own way
    to burn away mind's fog?

    The world's smudged edges
    are charming but coffee
    makes the day smell better
    and high-level sun keeps
    the world warm and dry.

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    Tony Beyer: These quarters

    the mountain exhibits
    a fringe of snow near the summit
    cold days then too warm
    all February

    at least we’ve been spared
    the floods to the north and east
    human misery now
    evidently human contrived

    what used to be Acts of God
    seen as acts of man
    (gender specificity
    a given)

    and the road or path or
    foot track ahead
    no easier by all accounts
    than the muddle that brought us this far

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    Katherine Gallagher: Tree-Watch and Green Cinquains
     ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’; John Keats

    Leaders
    of Planet Earth
    gather at a health-spa
    float the feeling of bonhomie
    up-close.

    Go green . . .
    It’s our call now –
    oceans filled with plastic,
    seals dying and requiems for whales:
    flagged waste.

    Fight for
    cleaner food, air:
    our chance, a mended life.
    Around Euston Square, earth-lovers
    protest.

    Robins
    lighten the dusk.
    Pure notes quivering, sharp
    rivulets of neighbourliness ?
    marked time.

    Tree-watch –
    remembering
    when you first hugged a tree.
    That was a kind of beginning,
    heart-sure.

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    Mary Franklin: Broken

    Ominous morning, cold and damp.
    The world is broken.
    All we can do is try to be kind
    and take care of ourselves.
    The rest is out of our hands.
    But why do we keep electing
    those unsuitable for office?

    From Humpty Dumpty we learned
    failure doesn’t come from falling down,
    it comes from not getting up.
    Who dropped the world?
    No matter.
    The world was dropped
    and now it’s broken.

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Tony Beyer writes in Taranaki, New Zealand. His print titles include Dream Boat: selected poems (HeadworX) and Anchor Stone (Cold Hub Press).

Megan Cartwright is an Australian college teacher and writer. Her poetry has recently featured in Fatal Flaw Magazine and Quadrant.

Robert Cole was born in Kilburn, in 1951, he attended Middlesex university studying creative writing; his poetry & prose is published in many magazines in the UK & USA. He was the editor of Chimera magazine for twenty years. He lives with his wife in Brittany, associated with Spoken World broadcasting throughout the world

Peter Daniels has published three poetry collections, Counting Eggs (Mulfran, 2012), A Season in Eden (Gatehouse, 2016), and My Tin Watermelon (Salt, 2019) which formed part of his PhD at Goldsmiths College, London. He has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian (Angel Classics, 2013), and as queer writer in residence at the London Metropolitan Archives he wrote the obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby. www.peterdaniels.org.uk

Tony Dawson has lived in Seville for many years. Poems published in Critical Survey and elsewhere, e.g. London Grip, The Five-Two, The Syndic Literary Journal, Home Planet News, Lighten Up Online & Loch Raven Review. A collection, Afterthoughts ISBN: 978-81-19228-34-8 was published in June 2023.

Julia Deakin is widely published, with each of her four collections praised by top UK poets. She edits Pennine Platform magazine and has appeared twice on Poetry Please but never, unlike her thespian namesake, on Coronation Street.

Sue Dymoke’s most recent collection is What They Left Behind (Shoestring Press). Recent projects include Poetry Place (Inspire/Miner2Major) and a Found poetry sequence for Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature. Sue was Associate Professor of Education at Nottingham Trent University where she researched Young Poets’ Stories until her death on June 13th, 2023. There will be a public memorial celebration of her life in Nottingham this November. Her Shoestring Press collection, What to do Next, which was in preparation before her death and includes this poem, will be published in early November

Mary Franklin’s poems have been published in numerous print and online journals including Anthropocene, Hobo Campo Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Iota, London Grip and Three Drops from a Cauldron. Her tanka have appeared in journals in Australia, Canada, UK and USA. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

John Freeman’s most recent books are Plato’s Peach (Worple) and, with photographer Chris Humphrey, Visions of Llandaff (The Lonely Press). He grew up in London and now lives in Wales.

Wendy French’s latest book, Bread Without Butter, is published by Rockingham Press and is a reflection on her Welsh ancestry and the Welsh people whom she is proud to be descended from

Katherine Gallagher is a North London Australian poet. Her most recent collections are Acres of Light (Arc Publications, 2016) and Carnival Edge: New & Selected (also from Arc Publications, 2010). She is working on another collection.

Elizabeth Gibson is a poet from Wigan, based in Manchester. She has received a Poetry School New North Poets Prize, and an Arts Council England DYCP grant, and her work has appeared in Atrium, Berlin Lit, Confingo, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Lighthouse, Magma, The North, Strix, and Under the Radar. Find her at https://elizabeth-gibson.com.

David Goldstein is a counsellor and developing poet living in Bristol. His poetry seeks to explore moments from his own life which seem to resonate beyond themselves and invite further reflection.

Laura Grevel is a poet, fiction writer and blogger. Originally from the USA, she lives in Europe. Her work tackles the immigrant experience, storytelling, nature, politics and even grackle squawks. Her readings can be heard on international poetry Zooms, and her YouTube channel.

Stuart Handysides began writing feature articles as a general practitioner, continued while working as an editor of medical publications, and in recent years has focused on poetry. His work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. He has run the Ware Poets competition for several years

Lydia Harris has made her home in the Orkney island of Westray. Her first full collection Objects for Private Devotion was long listed for the 2022 Highland Book Prize.

Deborah Harvey has an MA in Creative Writing and is co-director of The Leaping Word, which provides writing, editing and counselling support for writers exploring personal material in their work. Her fifth poetry collection, Learning Finity, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in March 2022. She is currently writing poems on the theme of estrangement.

Norbert Hirschhorn is a public health physician, commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero.” He has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent, Over the Edge (Holland Park Press). See his website, www.bertzpoet.com

Pam Job is an Essex poet, an active member of both Suffolk Poetry Society and Mosaic Stanza groups. Most recently she has been working on an ekphrastic project responding to a major exhibtion of contemporary women artists, ‘Big Women’, at Colchester’s First Site Gallery. She is currently putting together a pamphlet of her work over the past ten years and trying not to re-write every poem.

Jennifer Johnson has had poems published in a number of magazines and anthologies, most recently in Stand and Acumen. Her collections are Footprints on Africa and Beyond (Hearing Eye, 2005) and Hints and Shadows (Nettle Press, 2017). She was a Bread and Roses award winner in 2022

Fred Johnston was born in Belfast in 1951. His most recent collection of poems is Rogue States(Salmon Poetry 2019.) He is completing a collection of short stories, for which he received an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary in 2019. Work has appeared in The New Statesman, The Spectator, Stand, The Temenos Academy Review. He lives in Galway in the West of Ireland.

Charles G. Lauder, Jr., is an American poet who has lived in the UK for over twenty years. He’s published two pamphlets,Bleeds and Camouflaged Beasts, and a debut collection, The Aesthetics of Breath, which was published by V.Press in 2019.

Hannah Linden’s most recent awards include 1st prize in the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021 and Highly Commended, Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, published by V. Press, was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award 2023. Twitter: @hannahl1n

Rupert Loydell is the editor of Stride and a contributing editor to International Times. He has many books of poetry in print, including The Age of Destruction and Lies, recently published by Shearsman.

Jacob Mckibbin is a poet from Oxford. He has recently had work in Oxford Poetry and Ink Sweat & Tears.

Caleb Murdock is a 72-year-old American who worked as a word-processing operator for most of his life. He had writer’s block until he was about 67, when approaching mortality fixed that problem. Having tripled his output in just five years he is now seeking publication late in life

New Zealand poet James Norcliffe has published eleven collections of poetry including Shadow Play (Proverse), 2013 Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (VUP) 2016 & Deadpan (Otago UP) 2019. His latest collection Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press) was published in 2023. He was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2022.

Rosemary Norman’s fourth collection, Solace, was published last year by Shoestring Press. This year she and video artist Stuart Pound have published Words & Pictures, a book of poems and stills with a link to their videos online

Tina Norris is a professional photographer and potter living in Scotland. This would be her first published poem since high school. Some time ago.

Denise O’Hagan is a Sydney-based editor and poet, born in Rome. Recipient of the Dalkey Poetry Prize (Ireland), her work is published internationally. Her second poetry collection, Anamnesis, was a category finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award (2023). https://denise-ohagan.com

Stuart Pickford lives in Harrogate, and taught in a local comprehensive school. He is married with three children. His second collection, Swimming with Jellyfish, was published by Smith/Doorstop.

Estelle Price lives in St Albans but can often be found on the Ll?n Peninsula, close to the sea. She is the winner of the 2023 Welshpool Poetry Competition, the 2023 Mairtin Crawford Award, the 2021 Welsh Poetry Competition and the 2018 Book of Kells Writing Competition. She was published in June 2022 by Nine Arches Press as part of their emerging poets series, Primers 6. She writes from a feminist perspective on a range of themes including her East End past, the body and the Bloomsbury Group. Her poetry has been long listed twice in the National and placed or listed in the Bridport, Welshpool, London Magazine, Much Wenlock, Canterbury, Verve and other competitions. Poems have left home for Poetry Wales, Crannog, Marble Poetry, 14 Lines, Alchemy Spoon and the Stony Thursday Book. Before she knew she was a poet she was a lawyer, a classicist, a charity worker. Twitter: @EstelleHPrice Instagram: @estellehelen Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/estelle.goodwin.10

Tim Relf’s poetry has appeared in The Spectator, Acumen, Bad Lilies, The Rialto, Stand, The Frogmore Papers, Wild Court and One Hand Clapping. He’s had three novels published – the most recent by Penguin, which has now been translated into 20 languages. He is 2023 poet-in-residence at Leicester Botanic Garden.

Bill Richardson is Emeritus Professor in Spanish at the University of Galway, Ireland, and has had poems published in, inter alia, Skylight 47, Amethyst Review, The Stony Thursday Book, Atrium, Orbis, 14, The High Window, Boats Against The Current and the Fish Anthology 2020.

Janice D. Soderling has published poems, flash fiction, short stories and translations in such venues as Magma; Flash: The International Short Story Magazine; Wasafiri; and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her most recent poetry collection is Rooms and Closets.

Jim C Wilson’s writing has been widely published for nearly 40 years. The most recent of his five poetry collections is Come Close and Listen (Greenwich Exchange). His poems have been featured in over 40 anthologies. He taught Poetry in Practice sessions at Edinburgh University from 1994 until 2019, and currently at the Scottish Poetry Library. He was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow from 2001 until 2007. He won first prize in several poetry competitions and was the Scottish Arts Council Writer in Residence for Stirling District.More information: www.jimcwilson.com

Ping Yi works in public service and has been writing fiction, travelogues and poetry since 1989. He believes strongly against chronocentrism, and would love to learn and tell the stories of the generations and civilisations before us, and of those to come.

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